Saturday, 26 February 2011

Smells like a Brewery in here

So, today our good friends S&K are coming to dinner. We're having pork (of course, that's the whole reason for inviting them!) and I thought I'd try Jamie's slow roast pork recipe. It takes 6 hours, but is for a 2 kg joint. My joint is 3.5 kg, so I spent a frustrating few minutes this morning trying to work out how much to increase the cooking time to.

In the end, it meant that I needed to get the Pork on *immediately* . It was still cold from the fridge, so I've increased the initial blast of Gas 7 (180, 160Fan) from 30 mins to 45 mins. I then covered in foil, and turned the heat down to gas 3 (150 fan) and set the timer for 6 hours (1.5 hours more than Jamie's recipe).

DH came home from doing the allotment chickens, and started to make sausages. I did the calculations for him, and weighed out the seasoning and rusk, and left him to it. I braved the town centre to get vegetables for dinner, bits for the ham cure, and other bits. I'm never going into town on a Saturday again.

When I got home, DH had made one enormous batch of sausages, and was busy bagging them up. The 3.1kg of sausage meat allocated to this batch turned into 4 kilos of sausages.

I started to make the lemon curd for tonight's dessert, while he made the second batch. 1kg of sausagemeat turned into 1.3 kg of sausages. They smell divine.

DH started to make the Wiltshire Cure for the ham. We've found several recipes for Wiltshire Cure, all different. In the end we settled on Hugh's recipe, so DH ended up boiling up a huge vat of cure, which included 1kg of treacle and 3 litres of beer. Boddington's was on offer, so that's what we had.

The sboiling mixture smells gorgeous, very malty and beery - in a good way. Smells like a brewery in here.